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OPM issued its fiscal 2011 Official Time report. The data shows employees, on average, spent 2.82
hours on union-related work during official
hours. The cost of official time also increased
by almost 12 percent.

How does an average employee spend 3 hours a week on union activities? I haven't spent one hour in a career.
Well, it's all in the spin I suppose.
If I work in labor relations, maybe I spend my entire week on such matters.
So, if we add in 13 other full-time employees who spend no time on such activities, you will get the per week average in the report.
Is that high? Maybe. But having the report make it seem like every employee is engaged in such activity is misleading.

I'm guessing the writer meant to say the average union steward (or whatever they're called) spent three hours a week, which seems awful low.
And I agree with the others that the unions provide little value, if any.

want to help improve the Federal work force they should atart by working with Departments and Agencies in getting rid of the dead-wood. There are far too many honest hard-working Federal employees that have to pick up workload of others because of the laziness and ineptitude of others. The Government needs to establish good training venues that teach supervisors how to manage their employees, correct poor workmanship and how to take steps to rid the workplace of those that are sub-standard. However, the local union force needs to realize that they are part of the problem when they shield employees that are not pulling their weight.

Once again, we see the Federal employee unions benefiting in the form of the exorbitant payoff for their electoral support of the President and his allies through the rapidly escalating use of official time being provided to union officials to conduct union business. The averaging out of 2.82 hours over the year so spent for each Federal employee reflects this exploding ripoff of taxpayers. It's evident that the unions are out of control in this regard and are being given, in effect, a ever-increasing subsidy courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers. Agency managers appear to be clearly intimidated from seeking to bring this flagrant abuse under control. Her's another rathole, to the tune of $155.7 milllion, being used to drain Federal resources with little if any identifiably positive impact on delivery of service to tyhe American people, Enough already.

One, this assessment seems vague and weird really. But one thing it does speak to is that there are some agencies that are having larger issues such as DHS and VA. I am a steward. There is always a surge of activity at the time of mid term evals and end of year evals. What I always tell supervisors is this. It should never be a shock to your employee when they come in for their evals. A effective supervisor should be having more than 2 times a year communication with their employees-not wait to spring it on them at mid and end of year. Input is very important to the staff. Evals almost force the need of representation because the employee has the opinion of how well they think they are doing and then the supervisor has their opinions. If evals are successful, and communication is done throughout the year, my job as steward is little to none. But if an employee thinks they are excellent and the supervisor says they are mediocre or less-then we have problems that can take several rounds of talks. Again, it comes down to why a supervisor doesnt talk to their people as things are happening so that the employee can correct things along the way-not wait until they've done 6 months of wrong and to have that supervisor come in with the running tab of all your misdoings. This is how people do evals-its a running tab of mistakes, not any corrective actions along the way.